Dr. Maria Terzi is the Co-Founder & CEO of Malloc, an AI-driven cybersecurity startup focused on mobile and app security and the first Cypriot company to join Y Combinator. She holds a BSc in Computer Science Innovation and a PhD in Machine Learning and Recommender Systems from the University of Lancaster. During her PhD, Maria worked as a Software Engineer at Google (Zurich). Upon returning to Cyprus, she served as a Research Associate at the Cyprus University of Technology (2016–2018) and the KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence (2018–2020), as well as an Associate Lecturer at UCLan Cyprus (2016–2018) and the University of Cyprus (2018–2020). Maria won two Google hackathons, excelled in TopCoder competitions, and was selected as a Secure and Private AI Scholar by Facebook (Meta) in 2020. In November 2020 she left KIOS to fully focus on building Malloc. Under her leadership, Malloc secured funding, launched a mobile security app that surpassed one million downloads from people from all over the world, joined Y Combinator and received almost $2M in seed investment. Maria has been named among Europe’s “35 under 35” by the European Commission, recognized as one of the “Faces of Europe” by the European Parliament, and receiving both the MF Woman of the Year Award (Innovation Track) and the Forbes Cyprus Women in Tech Award. Beyond Malloc, she advocates for privacy, cybersecurity, and AI, and supports the local tech ecosystem as part of the hack{cyprus} organizing team.